When Budgets Fight Back! – PPC Tuesday

Learn how to translate what the “Limited by Budget” status means to you.

Limited By Budget?

Today I want to focus on that pesky message that AdWords’ advertisers often see in their accounts.

That message is the sometimes misleading “Limited by Budget” campaign status. This happens when your ads do not receive as many impressions as possible due to the campaign’s budget. As a result your ads will not be visible for every search to ensure that Google does not exceed your monthly budget.

In the end Google encourages advertisers to increase their budgets. And to help guide you they provide a handy tool to show you suggested increases and what that means to your campaign.

Google’s Idea for Your Budget

Here you can see an example of the Budget Idea tool. It shows you various budget amounts and the potential daily clicks, cost, and Cost per Click.

From here you can change your budget or cancel the increase and keep the budget as is. This is Google’s nonchalant way of making you feel that you are missing out on large amounts of traffic but as you can see here it is only opening you up for a potential of one extra click.

So there needs to be more thought on the advertiser’s side in order to determine if a budget change is necessary.

Budget, Budget, Budget

So how do you decide if a campaign truly deserves the extra investment? Well at Exclusive Concepts the way that we determine a budget decrease or increase is conversions.

If a campaign isn’t converting but hitting it’s budget rather than investing more money into the campaign time should be spent analyzing the campaigns, keywords, and ad copy.

But in a perfect world, your campaign would be generating conversions for your site. So if this is the case and you are still hitting your budget you could be possibly losing out on additional sales. Let’s remember that if you are hitting your budget than your ads are not getting all of the potential impressions.

You are now faced with the second question, do I increase my budget? As with everything in AdWords you will need to test the change and allow it some time to see if the change was a positive one. At Exclusive Concepts, we understand that this decision can be a difficult one for business owners who are very budget conscious. What we look to do for our clients is to reallocate funds in order to maximize your daily account budget.

Put Your Budget, Where Your Sales Are

The way that we approach budget allocation is to look at your campaign budgets across the account. If you have a converting campaign that is continuously being maxed out and another campaign that is not maxing out at all you have some opportunity.

First, you will want to ensure that if you were to decrease budget in Campaign 2 that you will not face this same situation down the road. By looking at the average daily spend over the last 3 months you can get a sense of how much of that budget is consistently being used. You can then confidently shift the excess budget and apply it to Campaign 1 in order to increase that budget and potentially increase sales.

This tactic allows you to meet the demand of your account without having to take money from other business initiatives.

Mo Budget, Mo Sales

Of course the goal of every AdWords advertiser is to get your account to a point where you can confidently add funds and scale up your account and drive even more sales.

Then we can look at AdWords as a way for businesses to buy sales and give owners the power to dictate what they are willing to spend to get their sales through PPC.